Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM)
All analytical and simulation research on ad hoc wireless networks must necessarily model radio propagation using simplifying assumptions. We provide a comprehensive review of six assumptions that are still part of many ad hoc network simulation studies, despite increasing awareness of the need to represent more realistic features, including hills, obstacles, link asymmetries, and unpredictable fading. We use an extensive set of measurements from a large outdoor routing experiment to demonstrate the weakness of these assumptions, and show how these assumptions cause simulation results to differ significantly from experimental results. We close with a series of recommendations for researchers, whether they develop protocols, analytic models, or simulators for ad hoc wireless networks.
David Kotz, Calvin Newport, Robert S. Gray, Jason Liu, Yougu Yuan, and Chip Elliott. Experimental Evaluation of Wireless Simulation Assumptions. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM), October 2004. 10.1145/1023663.1023679